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War Flying over Silicon Valley

It had to be done. The reaction to our war flying story last week was much greater than we anticipated. The news has practically been reported all over the world by media outlets, many of whom failed to understand both the reasons why this undertaking came to fruition, and what its ramifications are. TechTV was so interested that they invited our war flying crew up to Silicon Valley for an interview and to fly 'em on a trip around the Bay. What would the situation in Silicon Valley be? You might be surprised.

Shortly after 9:00 AM we were airborne and heading north. The cigarette lighter in the plane wasn?t working, so we couldn?t power our laptops during the flight. Since I didn?t want to show up in Foster City with a dead battery, I only ran NetStumbler for about 10 minutes after take off. Still that was enough to get a set of APs while we were at 4,500? and three miles off the coast. So, after doing a little math, we can see that unless the access point was on a boat, it was at least 3.12 miles away. Not bad for a Dell TrueMobile 1150 and an AIR-ANT1728 Cisco 5.2 dBi omni-directional antenna.

Not to worry. Delta Farce is retiring from good-old fashioned war flying for now, so don't expect to see "War Flying: the Really Windy Years," or "For Whom the Flying Tolls War" anytime soon. Enjoy!

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher